Disgendered

Bibliographic Data

ID3636743
AuthorsCody C St Clair (corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume30
Issue4
Pages465-484
Publication date2024-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1064-2684 • E-ISSN: 1527-9375
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/10642684-11330994
OpenAlexW4403629556
LanguageEN
References cited27

In US literary history, the Great Depression stands as a wellspring of poetry and prose that imagines homelessness otherwise, that reads the embodiments and relationalities of homeless dispossession as an abolitionist horizon, cutting across the structural, epistemic violence of urban sociology, welfare bureaucracy, and the carceral state as well as practicing radical alternatives of relating to housing. Arguably influenced by discourses on subproletarian pathology, myriad Depression-era writers regarded the homeless as bereft of futurity, and they understood the condition of unhoused immiseration as a state of social death that marked the homeless as kinless. This literary vein conceived of homelessness as a disgendering experience in which the homeless body becomes an aberration from the heteropatriarchal gender binary. Alongside this literature of homeless nonfuturity, this article locates a literary countercurrent that explores how homeless persons continue to build kinships and collective futures that manifest through and exceed their bare existence. In particular, the article examines the poem "Homeless but Not Motherless" (1935) and the novel The Girl (ca. 1939), finding in both a recognition not only of the disgendering violence of homelessness but also of the potentialities for forging kinship across exclusions from labor, housing, family, and civil society

Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy

Tools

Open DOI